I’ve started to think that there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the concept of noblesse oblige. By which I mean that I think it is misunderstood both by people who believe that they are displaying it, or that they ought to display it, and by people who are inclined to judge others for it or for its absence.
In particular: I think people believe that it’s about gestures. That if you’re rich or blue-blooded or privileged or whatever, that every so often you have to demonstrate that you’re a decent person with decent human sentiments by reaching out and doing something nice for some poor less-fortunate schlub. Give a whole bunch to a photogenic charity, or leave a really big tip, or some such.
And the thing is that, as a social strategy, that almost never works.
(There are rare exceptions. If the gesture is really big and really costly and really resonant, it can have some real moral impact. This almost certainly requires anteing up something other than money; poor schlubs naturally assume that big-shots possess functionally infinite money anyway, and aren’t impressed by their financial expenditures. The thing where old-money families send their sons off to war, even when it would obviously be easy for them to get out of fighting if they wanted, is a good example. That said – )
Envy can’t be beaten with moral suasion. If people are inclined to resent you for your wealth or your position, you’ve already lost the social game, there’s basically no gesture you can make that will change their minds. It doesn’t matter how nice you are. The hinge of envy is “I think this person has advantages that he doesn’t deserve,” and no one seriously believes that the way you come to deserve advantages is by being nice.
The way you deserve advantages is by playing a necessary role.
And that’s what noblesse oblige is really about. It’s about demonstrating that the community relies upon you (whatever “the community” means in context), and thus that your wealth/privilege/etc. is an important aspect of The Way Things Work, rather than simply being a random private benefit. It’s about employing two dozen domestic servants in your giant country manor, or maybe running the factory that employs half the breadwinners in town. It’s about being available as a fair and trustworthy judge for people’s disputes. It’s about serving as a private social safety net of last resort, through some means or other. In a very fundamental sense, of course, it’s about taking up your longsword and your plate mail and protecting your peasants from bandits.
This is a lot harder than it used to be. Rich powerful people aren’t the pillars of small communities anymore; they live in all-rich-and-powerful-person communities of their own. Often, they get their wealth and power through arcane methods that have no obvious direct positive consequences for any specific people. I know.
But if you’ve got privilege and you want to keep it, I’d strongly encourage you to think hard about this. The “I’m just a regular guy like you, except with tons of money and influence” strategy is rapidly ceasing to work at all, and it never worked that well to begin with. Stable aristocracies have something to offer.
Hannah Arendt talks about this – not using the term noblesse oblige, just talking about the dynamic – which is why it comes to mind. As she explains the historical precedents, exploiter classes generally don’t fall to revolutions or reorganizations. Exploitation sucks, but it tends to grow out of a stable productive relationship between the exploiter and exploitee, which provides at least some meaningful benefits to both of them. The upper classes that fall are the ones that no longer have any capacity to exploit anyone, the ones that are identical to the lower classes except for being much richer…
Earning your privileges through the the aggregate gains by others resulting from your fulfillment of the duties of your position is an anachronistic framing.
The privilege/duty combination is a feature of hierarchical frameworks and, to my knowledge, these ground themselves in appeal to history or natural law and not to their utility to the masses. Noblesse oblige does not exist in an egalitarian framework because there is no nobility to feel the burden. Importing it strikes me as an ad hoc fix for emergent inequality that the framework is not natively equipped to handle.
I see the rich people in your examples receiving censure either for a kind of category error (charitable giving asserting a social position that an egalitarian society does not agree should exist) or neglect (failing to send your children to war in a hierarchical society). The cure for the first is to act like you’re not rich or perhaps move somewhere where no one notices/makes a point of your wealth. You’re certainly right that gestures from the powerful don’t have the reinforcing social effect of true noblesse oblige.
Hrm. I do agree with most of this.
I think the relevant point-of-bridging is that, while you do in fact need stable hierarchy for noblesse oblige to function as intended, you don’t necessarily need an ancien regime blood-aristocracy or anything particularly resembling one. You just need an identifiable upper class with an actual valued role to play.
(Modern-era establishment Republicans have been trying to cobble that situation together by talking about “job creators” etc., claiming that we get our employment-centric prosperity from the virtue and duty of our contemporary aristoi. This fails hilariously, because (a) our alleged employment-centric prosperity has collapsed into rubble, and (b) insofar as the system is in fact running, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the “job creators” as a class aren’t doing anything special to make that happen.)
It’s true that the aristocrats traditionally haven’t justified their existence by straight-up appealing to the welfare of the masses, or even (more relevantly) by appealing to their functional role in preserving a non-frightening status quo…but I believe that, in actual reality, it is having such a role that allows aristocratic classes to exist without being destroyed by revolt or erosion.
And since we actually have identifiable aristocrats who don’t want to get overthrown, and who have giant piles of money and a precarious grip on power, I assert that it would be wise for them to find such a role pronto.
I agree that you don’t need blood-aristocracy in order to have a stable hierarchy but I don’t think our modern wealthy classes are able to fill the necessary role.
The symbolic function of nobility performing their duty was very much a way of asserting a natural (total) order and demonstrating the stability of that order. This stability was the main benefit to a mostly agrarian society who believed that the only thinkable alternative was Kali Yuga - not the direct results of the fulfilled duties. Maintaining the total order was the point, otherwise I would predict that more power sharing arrangements would have been found to give villages more local autonomy.
Our modern society is descendant from merchants and clerks. Their social model internally provided only a partial ordering of the world with duties only running to your direct superior and not across disparate organizations. The role of the wealthy within this framework is constrained by that same partial ordering. Even if they could find a course of action that generates the same stability of noblesse oblige, they still would have to expend a lot of work to get anyone to buy it and probably deeply reorder society in order to do so.
The root of our disagreement is that I don’t believe the egalitarian/transactional framing of modern society allows for the existence of a ‘noble’ role as traditionally conceived and so the course of action you proposed is not achievable for structural reasons. I’m happy to hear examples to the contrary or corrections to my very simple history.
…I don’t know that you’re wrong, at all. I don’t know that such a role exists; certainly I don’t really have one to propose. I’m just saying, without finding one, the current Masters of the Universe may be in for a rough ride. We’ve seen what happens when modern societies get totally coked-up on envy and resentment of the rich.
That said, in fact I’m generally unimpressed by claims like “this Whole Civilization is rooted in such-and-such an understanding of how things work [e.g. “egalitarian/transactional”], and any big social change is going to have to operate within that framework.” People are terrifyingly flexible, even in large numbers, and social assumptions shift constantly. I have a vague-but-powerful sense that, at least in America, there are large populations right now that are really pretty close to being OK with a pseudo-feudal ordering of the world so long as it gives them a stable place. Probably the would-be aristos would have to avoid certain bits of triggering rhetoric, but…